Horror fiction magazines are a dime a dozen, and I avoid most of them because I’m rarely impressed by their often amateurish outings. Judging by its debut issue, SHOCK TOTEM: CURIOUS TALES OF THE MACABRE AND TWISTED is something different, and not just because it’s perfect-bound, rather than stapled. Its contents are well-written, and the whole package is well-designed — and that’s something most indie publishers don’t realize goes a long, long way.
T.L Morganfield goes first with “The Music Box,” which certainly is the best short story I’ve ever read about children’s stuffed animals with minds of their own. Two women kill a guy and then wonder how to break the news to his wife in Mercedes M. Yardley’s comical “Murder for Beginners.”
Don D’Ammassa provides simple pleasures with “Complexity,” a semi-disturbing number about a newly unemployed guy so paranoid, he’s doing everything he can to cut off all contact with the outside world. David Niall Wilson hits a triple with “Slider,” about a baseball carrying a terrible curse, stemming from that one day in 1939 when it killed its own pitcher during a game.
In a first-chapter excerpt from the novel KILLERCON, William Ollie pays tribute to the sex-and-violence-charged work of Richard Laymon, and Brian Rappatta visits the trailer park in “The Dead March,” in which a boy brings his abused mother back to life. In structure and originality, Kurt Newton takes the cake with “Thirty-Two Scenes from a Dead Hooker’s Mouth,” which is exactly what you’d think it is: a jumble of events all involving the orifice of a drugged-out whore named Nikki. You won’t soon forget it.
Dotting SHOCK TOTEM’s pages are poems (but only a few, for those allergic to verse); three interviews, deemed “conversations” (including one with genre favorite John Skipp); and a few pages of reviews of horror movies, books and CDs. But perhaps its most interesting feature is the closing “Howling Through the Keyhole,” in which each contributor is given a couple of paragraphs to discuss how their story came to be. It offers a unique glimpse into the creative process, and is something I’d like to see in more anthologies.
It’s only $5.99, which is a bargain for a 100-page issue this well-made. Support it so there will be a second. —Rod Lott
Buy it at Shock Totem or Amazon.
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Good call, Rod. Ordering my copy now. These are the types of projects that need to be supported…and thank you for not letting this title slip by our radar.
Thanks, Rod. Very much appreciated!
Stay well,
Ken